Moments of Permanence - Good people do bad things: demonising Them is not the answer

From: sami Date: May 22nd, 2009 02:17 pm (UTC) (Link)

One piece of that context is my friend's work on the tendency to privilege the narratives of the perpetrators over those of the victims and survivors.

But that's not the case here. There are no competing narratives - they're separate stories.

Stangl's membership of the Nazi party while it was illegal is questionable. He claimed that he forged it later for self-preservation; there is no direct evidence whether this was or wasn't true, as far as I know, but it was certainly not uncommon, and it is consistent with other known details of his life at the time.

Regardless, the precise details of Stangl's life aren't precisely the issue. Is is provable from evidence that in his youth he was deeply concerned with issues of morality; after the war, he appeared to have divorced himself from the very concept. He didn't insist that he had to do what he did - the point is not that he was forced, the point is that carelessness and inattention to the greater context of one's actions can lead to a gradual erosion of better impulse such that he did not, at any point, choose not to.

Regardless of whether you "know a little bit about" the position of assuming that Germans who went along with the Nazi regime were a priori evil, you seem to be maintaining that as your argument. I cannot support that.

Being "uncomfortable" with the idea that a decent person can be corrupted to the point of becoming thoroughly indecent is kind of the point. It's not comfortable, it's terrifying and unnerving and something no-one wants to think can be true. It's easier if you can condemn unreservedly, it's easier if you can assume that people who do bad things are Bad People.

However.

Consider the present.

American soldiers either allowed or participated in the torture and mistreatment of prisoners. Ordinary soldiers. They committed acts of deliberate, barbaric cruelty. Are they Bad People, or are they ordinary people, whose sense of right and wrong has been eroded by circumstance?

The American people let it happen. It's not that no-one knew - everyone's known since Abu Ghraib that torture is happening. The conditions of prisoners at Guantanemo Bay are not a secret. It's not a secret that people have been held without trial or counsel for years.

Does that make American citizens automatically bad people, because almost no-one's really, genuinely tried to stop it?

How about the disabled children being murdered in schools?

Black people getting harassed or even killed just for being black in the wrong place at the wrong time? People hear about it and disapprove, but they don't DO anything.

Where's the line? There's a difference between all of these things and the Holocaust, but that difference is only one of scale. That's the whole point. Everyone has a limit of tolerance, but that limit can shift. And if it shifts too far, it ceases to mean anything at all, and if it shifts slowly enough, you might not notice it happening.

Good people can become bad people.

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From: schemingreader Date: May 22nd, 2009 02:55 pm (UTC) (Link)

Regardless of whether you "know a little bit about" the position of assuming that Germans who went along with the Nazi regime were a priori evil, you seem to be maintaining that as your argument. I cannot support that.

This is my third comment, and it's the third time that I'm telling you that it's not my position that people are good or evil. People do good or do evil, they don't become good or evil.

If you become evil, you're no longer responsible for your actions. That's why Stangl made this argument. He wanted to say that anyone could have done this. I don't think that's true. He decided to kill people. He was not morally deadened or amoral, or he wouldn't have tried to justify himself in this way.

Your examples from the US are entirely compelling. The people convicted for implementing government policy to torture prisoners at Abu Ghraib were, as Stangl tried to assert he was, compelled by their social context to follow orders. There is recognition under law of some culpability in soldiers who follow immoral orders, though most countries understand that culpability to be limited. (Which is largely the result of public reaction to post WWII trials.)

Here in the US, there has been political agitation to hold the people who issued the orders accountable for their crimes, to close the black sites, to close Guantanamo and Bagram. Some of that political movement has come from within our military.

If I had to compare Stangl's role to anyone's role in the unfolding torture scandal in the US, I would compare him to the psychologists who pushed for the SERE program to be turned into a training program for torturers. In both cases, people lent their technical expertise to harming people. Stangl knew that he was going to be killing people in large numbers, and he understood that this was wrong. The psychologists in this case were aware that the scientific consensus was against the efficacy of torture as means of collecting intelligence. Currently, some of these psychologists are arguing that they felt pressure from the post-9/11, War on Terror context.

You would not, if you were an army psychologist, have argued in favor of creating a program to torture prisoners. You just wouldn't. It's not because you are a good person and they are bad people. It's because it takes an active moral choice to do the wrong thing. It would have been very difficult for the soldiers who were prosecuted for the Abu Ghraib discoveries to have refused their orders. (Though someone had to have the courage to leak the information that it was happening to cause the scandal in the first place.)

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From: sami Date: May 23rd, 2009 04:28 am (UTC) (Link)

This is my third comment, and it's the third time that I'm telling you that it's not my position that people are good or evil. People do good or do evil, they don't become good or evil.

If you become evil, you're no longer responsible for your actions.

I disagree with your position and your interpretation. People can become evil.

If you become evil, you are still responsible for your actions. The difference it makes is that you lose entitlement to forgiveness, to the benefit of the doubt, to the assumption of good intentions. Good people can do bad things if they're thoughtless, if they're misguided... and, under those circumstances, their errors should be corrected, the consequences repaired as much as possible, and the person given the opportunity to make amends as best they can, and forgiven thereafter.

Bad people don't get that.

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